I am a former Marine.
I work two jobs.
I don’t have health insurance.
I worked 60-70 hours a week for 8 years to pay my way through college.
I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years.
But I don’t blame Wall Street.
Suck it up you whiners.
I am the 53%.
God bless the USA!

The response was this:

I wanted to respond to you as a liberal. Because, although I think you’ve made yourself clear and I think I understand you, you don’t seem to understand me at all. I hope you will read this and understand me better, and maybe understand the Occupy Wall Street movement better.

First, let me say that I think it’s great that you have such a strong work ethic and I agree with you that you have much to be proud of. You seem like a good, hard-working, strong kid. I admire your dedication and determination. I worked my way through college too, mostly working graveyard shifts at hotels as a “night auditor.” For a time I worked at two hotels at once, but I don’t think I ever worked 60 hours in a week, and certainly not 70. I think I maxed out at 56. And that wasn’t something I could sustain for long, not while going to school. The problem was that I never got much sleep, and sleep deprivation would take its toll. I can’t imagine putting in 70 hours in a week while going to college at the same time. That’s impressive.

I have a nephew in the Marine Corps, so I have some idea of how tough that can be. He almost didn’t make it through basic training, but he stuck it out and insisted on staying even when questions were raised about his medical fitness. He eventually served in Iraq and Afghanistan and has decided to pursue a career in the Marines. We’re all very proud of him. Your picture reminds me of him.

So, if you think being a liberal means that I don’t value hard work or a strong work ethic, you’re wrong. I think everyone appreciates the industry and dedication a person like you displays. I’m sure you’re a great employee, and if you have entrepreneurial ambitions, I’m sure these qualities will serve you there too. I’ll wish you the best of luck, even though a guy like you will probably need luck less than most.

I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something.

Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week? Do you think you can? Because, let me tell you, kid, that’s not going to be as easy when you’re 50 as it was when you were 20.

And what happens if you get sick? You say you don’t have health insurance, but since you’re a veteran I assume you have some government-provided health care through the VA system. I know my father, a Vietnam-era veteran of the Air Force, still gets most of his medical needs met through the VA, but I don’t know what your situation is. But even if you have access to health care, it doesn’t mean disease or injury might not interfere with your ability to put in those 60- to 70-hour work weeks.

Do you plan to get married, have kids? Do you think your wife is going to be happy with you working those long hours year after year without a vacation? Is it going to be fair to her? Is it going to be fair to your kids? Is it going to be fair to you?

Look, you’re a tough kid. And you have a right to be proud of that. But not everybody is as tough as you, or as strong, or as young. Does pride in what you’ve accomplish mean that you have contempt for anybody who can’t keep up with you? Does it mean that the single mother who can’t work on her feet longer than 50 hours a week doesn’t deserve a good life? Does it mean the older man who struggles with modern technology and can’t seem to keep up with the pace set by younger workers should just go throw himself off a cliff?

And, believe it or not, there are people out there even tougher than you. Why don’t we let them set the bar, instead of you? Are you ready to work 80 hours a week? 100 hours? Can you hold down four jobs? Can you do it when you’re 40? When you’re 50? When you’re 60? Can you do it with arthritis? Can you do it with one arm? Can you do it when you’re being treated for prostate cancer?

And is this really your idea of what life should be like in the greatest country on Earth?

Here’s how a liberal looks at it: a long time ago workers in this country realized that industrialization wasn’t making their lives better, but worse. The captains of industry were making a ton of money and living a merry life far away from the dirty, dangerous factories they owned, and far away from the even dirtier and more dangerous mines that fed raw materials to those factories.

The workers quickly decided that this arrangement didn’t work for them. If they were going to work as cogs in machines designed to build wealth for the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies, they wanted a cut. They wanted a share of the wealth that they were helping create. And that didn’t mean just more money; it meant a better quality of life. It meant reasonable hours and better working conditions.

Eventually, somebody came up with the slogan, “8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of sleep” to divide the 24-hour day into what was considered a fair allocation of a human’s time. It wasn’t a slogan that was immediately accepted. People had to fight to put this standard in place. People demonstrated, and fought with police, and were killed. They were called communists (in fairness, some of them were), and traitors, and many of them got a lot worse than pepper spray at the hands of police and private security.

But by the time we got through the Great Depression and WWII, we’d all learned some valuable lessons about working together and sharing the prosperity, and the 8-hour workday became the norm.

The 8-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek became a standard by which we judged our economic success, and a reality check against which we could verify the American Dream.

If a family could live a good life with one wage-earner working a 40-hour job, then the American Dream was realized. If the income from that job could pay the bills, buy a car, pay for the kids’ braces, allow the family to save enough money for a down payment on a house and still leave some money for retirement and maybe for a college fund for the kids, then we were living the American Dream. The workers were sharing in the prosperity they helped create, and they still had time to take their kids to a ball game, take their spouses to a movie, and play a little golf on the weekends.

Ah, the halcyon days of the 1950s! Yeah, ok, it wasn’t quite that perfect. The prosperity wasn’t spread as evenly and ubiquitously as we might want to pretend, but if you were a middle-class white man, things were probably pretty good from an economic perspective. The American middle class was reaching its zenith.

And the top marginal federal income tax rate was more than 90%. Throughout the whole of the 1950s and into the early 60s.

Just thought I’d throw that in there.

Anyway, do you understand what I’m trying to say? We can have a reasonable standard for what level of work qualifies you for the American Dream, and work to build a society that realizes that dream, or we can chew each other to the bone in a nightmare of merciless competition and mutual contempt.

I’m a liberal, so I probably dream bigger than you. For instance, I want everybody to have healthcare. I want lazy people to have healthcare. I want stupid people to have healthcare. I want drug addicts to have healthcare. I want bums who refuse to work even when given the opportunity to have healthcare. I’m willing to pay for that with my taxes, because I want to live in a society where it doesn’t matter how much of a loser you are, if you need medical care you can get it. And not just by crowding up an emergency room that should be dedicated exclusively to helping people in emergencies.

You probably don’t agree with that, and that’s fine. That’s an expansion of the American Dream, and would involve new commitments we haven’t made before. But the commitment we’ve made to the working class since the 1940s is something that we should both support and be willing to fight for, whether we are liberal or conservative. We should both be willing to fight for the American Dream. And we should agree that anybody trying to steal that dream from us is to be resisted, not defended.

And while we’re defending that dream, you know what else we’ll be defending, kid? We’ll be defending you and your awesome work ethic. Because when we defend the American Dream we’re not just defending the idea of modest prosperity for people who put in an honest day’s work, we’re also defending the idea that those who go the extra mile should be rewarded accordingly.

Look kid, I don’t want you to “get by” working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week. If you’re willing to put in that kind of effort, I want you to get rich. I want you to have a comprehensive healthcare plan. I want you vacationing in the Bahamas every couple of years, with your beautiful wife and healthy, happy kids. I want you rewarded for your hard work, and I want your exceptional effort to reap exceptional rewards. I want you to accumulate wealth and invest it in Wall Street. And I want you to make more money from those investments.

I understand that a prosperous America needs people with money to invest, and I’ve got no problem with that. All other things being equal, I want all the rich people to keep being rich. And clever financiers who find ways to get more money into the hands of promising entrepreneurs should be rewarded for their contributions as well.

I think Wall Street has an important job to do, I just don’t think they’ve been doing it. And I resent their sense of entitlement – their sense that they are special and deserve to be rewarded extravagantly even when they screw everything up.

Come on, it was only three years ago, kid. Remember? Those assholes almost destroyed our economy. Do you remember the feeling of panic? John McCain wanted to suspend the presidential campaign so that everybody could focus on the crisis. Hallowed financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch went belly up. The government started intervening with bailouts, not because anybody thought “private profits and socialized losses” was fair, but because we were afraid not to intervene – we were afraid our whole economy might come crashing down around us if we didn’t prop up companies that were “too big to fail.”

So, even though you and I had nothing to do with the bad decisions, blind greed and incompetence of those guys on Wall Street, we were sure as hell along for the ride, weren’t we? And we’ve all paid a price.

All the” 99%” wants is for you to remember the role that Wall Street played in creating this mess, and for you to join us in demanding that Wall Street share the pain. They don’t want to share the pain, and they’re spending a lot of money and twisting a lot of arms to foist their share of the pain on the rest of us instead. And they’ve been given unprecedented powers to spend and twist, and they’re not even trying to hide what they’re doing.

All we want is for everybody to remember what happened, and to see what is happening still. And we want you to see that the only way they can get away without paying their share is to undermine the American Dream for the rest of us.

And I want you and I to understand each other, and to stand together to prevent them from doing that. You seem like the kind of guy who would be a strong ally, and I’d be proud to stand with you.

The reason? They’d find themselves needing to advance unreasonable arguments. Their “cushy” existence suddenly looks an awful lot like subsistence existence.

So they never do.

Your comment: “And these protestors should thank Wall Street for creating jobs that got them their entitled, privileged lifestyle.”

LOL! Right. After they’re bailed out by taxpayer money, in addition to $5 ATM fees, here’s more of their version of graditude. Sourced ABC NEWS: Sept. 12, 2011… “Bank of America, trying to break free from a pile of bad mortgages and a sagging stock price, announced plans to lay off 30,000 employees over the next few years.”

To which I replied, WHAT “human rights” are being violated by Wall Street?! And how on earth do you feel somehow entitled to what Wall Street has when you haven’t worked for it? I personally know one of the richest men in the world via the Forbes list – he went from NOTHING to being a billionaire on his own hard work and ingenuity, founding an entire industry that never even existed before he had the idea (leasing airplanes to airlines). And is he such a stingy fatcat? Heck no! He donated enough money to the Smithsonian that their aviation museum is named after him. I have nothing but the utmost respect for him and for others like him who have made the “American dream” reality – not because they felt somehow entitled, but because they went to work and MADE things happen. It’s more than I can say for these “protestors.”

I write: No. As a matter of fact I don’t. Your underlying premise, the underlying abstract conceptual “assumption” for this comment is flawed in fact. Your comment argues actually provides the argument against itself:

The USA is not the most inventive people dur to “freedom”, we are pathetically, number 40th.

Patents granted (per capita) (most recent) by country

Rank Countries Amount
# 1 Luxembourg: 431.098 per million people per 1
# 2 Slovenia: 52.2128 per million people per 1
# 3 Iceland: 50.5498 per million people per 1
# 4 Malta: 45.1655 per million people per 1
# 5 Finland: 35.8032 per million people per 1
# 6 Latvia: 31.0044 per million people per 1
# 7 Sweden: 30.1044 per million people per 1
# 8 Ireland: 26.3944 per million people per 1
# 9 New Zealand: 25.5266 per million people per 1
# 10 Switzerland: 24.4358 per million people per 1
# 11 Norway: 22.4254 per million people per 1
# 12 Austria: 20.1588 per million people per 1
# 13 Mongolia: 20.0645 per million people per 1
# 14 Korea, South: 16.0153 per million people per 1
# 15 Georgia: 14.3254 per million people per 1
# 16 Israel: 11.7891 per million people per 1
# 17 Netherlands: 11.5195 per million people per 1
# 18 Denmark: 9.5729 per million people per 1
# 19 Japan: 7.80116 per million people per 1
# 20 Lithuania: 7.50626 per million people per 1
# 21 Belgium: 6.94712 per million people per 1
# 22 Belarus: 4.85437 per million people per 1
# 23 Slovakia: 4.41908 per million people per 1
# 24 Australia: 3.7332 per million people per 1
# 25 Kazakhstan: 3.62176 per million people per 1
# 26 France: 3.37972 per million people per 1
# 27 Romania: 3.17958 per million people per 1
# 28 Bulgaria: 3.08725 per million people per 1
# 29 Germany: 2.85087 per million people per 1
# 30 Czech Republic: 2.73411 per million people per 1
# 31 Kyrgyzstan: 2.72056 per million people per 1
# 32 Armenia: 2.68186 per million people per 1
# 33 Hungary: 2.59818 per million people per 1
# 34 Turkmenistan: 2.01939 per million people per 1
# 35 Croatia: 2.00178 per million people per 1
# 36 Singapore: 1.8075 per million people per 1
# 37 Ukraine: 1.78735 per million people per 1
# 38 United Kingdom: 1.35669 per million people per 1
# 39 Spain: 1.04112 per million people per 1
# 40 United States: 0.97723 per million people per 1

Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_pat_gra_percap-economy-patents-granted-per-capita

Glad to hear your community figured it out. One attributing one’s success to “hard work” and “sacrifice” is one’s prerogative based upon one’s outlook and perspective. Another in your community might contribute the same success to your community beginning to “work smarter” vs. “work harder” (?) for example. If one is feeding one’s family employed as a dishwasher or sandwich meat cutter in a packaging plant, etc., the advice that they “should work harder and sacrifice” more easily translates as a nice motto for management to post around the workplace than it does as practical advice to someone working hard and not being able to keep up. It’s even less practical advice for any of the 14 or 15 million people for whom there exists a shortage of a job for them to work hard at.

But let’s go back to the validity of the underlying premise in a meme asserting that “hard work” and “sacrifice” are the solution to poor. As anecdotes, we see rags to riches stories now and then. Those stories are story-worthy not because they are common life experience like “Man eats toast for breakfast” but because they represent the exception, not the rule. If one takes the time to research and read the studies exploring upward economic mobility in the US one discovers that reality is not aligned with that American myth. Very few of us are actually able to climb to the next highest wrung above the economic strata we are born into. It happens, to be sure, but only incidentally (as story-spreading news goes lotto winners are story-worthy, lotto losers are not.) “Hard work and sacrifice” works – nowhere near the rate or myth implies. To paraphrase somebody, “If hard work and sacrifice were in fact the key, the slaves shipped into this country would have worked and sacrificed their way into owning this country long ago.” It’s the system we’re a part of and working with.

It’s the system that matters. Ours is broken today… for too many people. Income disparity has been increasing for 30 years, not 3 years as conservative political talking-point messaging would have us all think.

I am a inventor. I have the ability to invent things. I am registered with the government patent office as an “independent inventor”. As long as I can remember I have always been able to take things apart and do different things with the parts. I’m not McGiver, now, so don’t think I could build a nuclear reactor with a tube of toothpaste and a box of pencils. I’m not that kind of inventor. But when I had my business I realized that the reason why American’s are so inventive is because we are FREE to be that way. Freedom makes a huge difference in a person’s ability to create things. Our ability to create and invent is one of the other things that separates human’s from the animals. Our power of reasoning is what does it. But you definately have to be free to unlock that ability to it’s fullest. American’s can do that, and most other people in the world can’t. And it’s the only reason why, and that is because of our being FREE to do it, and they are not.

When those in our government believe that the American people should be controlled, it is they who are afraid of our ability to create ourselves out of poverty. That is what those in government want to control. They probably aren’t that creative themselves, and usually it is people like that who want to control someone who can create. If it’s a little bit more of money we earn for ourselves that we need in order to be able to create something we could sell, and then it could snowball and eventually get us out of poverty, then it’s that money those in government want to take away from us, in order to keep us poor. See, how that works?

In the mid 80′s America went through a horrible time when our oil and gas industries went on the skids. What I believe is the major oil companies knew that the powers that be wanted to create a scam called the “global economy”. Basically there is no such thing as a global economy. What it is, is a handful of “developing countries” that the international bankers and investors want their money to funnel through in order to suck those economies down so as to control what they do with their money. If those “developing” economies were to be allowed to develope on their own, eventually they would become self sufficient, almost a free interprise like America. But that’s not what the super wealthy want out of those economies. The super wealthy want control over any blossoming economy that used to be poor, but are now getting themselves out. But where did they get the money to develope their industries and manufacturing in order that their people have finally got jobs to provide for better lifestyles those people could only dream about before? The World Bank, and the International Monitary Fund. Where do they get their money? From “developed countries” tax payers whose money is being funneled through those countries governments. It’s from UN treaties developed countries sign in order to provide money other countries can get loans from. In other words it just more “redistribution of wealth” as ordered by the UN. And now Obama is talking with UN advisors about paying into what they are calling a “world poverty tax”, which is even more redistribution of wealth from America that syphons off our nations wealth we could use in order to help our developing industries and manufacturing by NOT taking money from them in more regulations and higher and higher taxes. It’s all geared to take money from our private companies ability to generate it’s own wealth, and give it to somebody else who the powers that be believe need it more than our countries companies do.

This kind of government intrusion into our ability to generate our own wealth is what keeps people poor who shouldn’t be poor, but since they can’t find work that pays enough for them to be able to work their way out of poverty, they remain poor. That is not those people’s fault, it is bad government that believes our money belongs to them in government, and not to us. Liberal Democrats are the one’s who take out these treaties with those in the UN who want money to be controled from developed countries and give it to developing countries. That would be fine if it weren’t for the purpose of controling that countries economy for the purpose of wealth redistribution, which is simply Socialism heading towards Communism.

“And this article, “The Occupiers’ World Awaits,” by David P. McGinley, perfectly expresses my sentiments about the “occupiers” throughout the world – let the “occupiers” go to North Korea. But that’s just my opinion.”

That conservative article-contributor appears to be confused, in his article, about why people are occupying the streets. If one still cannot not understand “why people are in the streets” a month later, because they are insulated into being completely oblivious about what has already changed in the minds of average Americans (or because they feign confusion about it in sophomoric set-ups to ridicule, blame and shame), they are likely a part of the problem.

There came a time in the 80′s where the “official” definition of what “poor” was came along. Being poor in the 80′s was a three bedroom house, one and ahalf bath, two cars, and all the amenities to go along with that level of lifestyle. Except what made you poor was the fact that you were living from paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t afford to do anything. See, I’ve been through all these levels of poverty in America and I know. Once we reached the new level of what was known as the “new poor” we had the house and cars, except we didn’t have two pennies to rub together. Like, once or twice a YEAR we slurged and bought “bacon” because it was so expensive and was a luxury to us. Everyone has some little thing that their income just wouldn’t allow, and for us it was bacon.

We went to a free debt councilor in our church one time. We wanted to know what we were doing wrong that it seemed we just couldn’t get out of the rut we were in. He was shocked we lived on so little that he asked “Why haven’t you gone bankrupt years ago?” When he figured out how much we spent a week on food he was shocked again. He was so saddened by our financial fix, being poor, that, at the end of the sessioin with him he had to tell us, “There’s nothing I can do for you.”. Well, hell we knew that when we came in there. We just wanted to have someone else take a look at our finances and figure out if there was any more we could do to free up somemore money. There wasn’t. We knew that.

But you know what? We worked our way out of all that and became “unpoor” after some years of hard work and sacrifice.